While a judge deliberates on whether Harry Potter superfan Steve Vander Ark and his publisher violated copyright law by producing a lexicon based on J.K. Rowling’s hit novels, the 50-year-old librarian has simply been trying to keep it together. This week he told the New Yorker all about the trauma caused by the recent trial, during which he broke down in tears. Hoping for acknowledgment from his idol, Vander Ark would look at Rowling during......

As the the Harry Potter copyright infringement trial drew to a close yesterday, the judge urged the two parties to use their “imaginations” and agree to a settlement. Judge Robert Patterson professed a love of literature and invoked Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as cautionary tale, “A very sad story. Litigation isn’t always the best way to solve things." But in their closing arguments, attorneys for both sides seemed far from a settlement. Rowling’s lawyers argue......

The 50-year-old librarian on the receiving end of a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the Harry Potter author was driven to tears yesterday while testifying in a Manhattan courtroom. Steven Jan Vander Ark (pictured), a former Star Trek fan from Michigan whose exhaustive website The Harry Potter Lexicon would be published in a print version by RDR Books, told lawyers that he was devastated by the lashing he’s received from J.K. Rowling and "the Harry......

There’s troubling news today for fans of fantasy tween novel franchises: Choking back tears in a Manhattan courtroom yesterday, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling testified that her lawsuit to stop the publication of an unauthorized “Harry Potter Lexicon” has caused her such stress and heartache that it “decimated the demands of my creative work for the last month. You lose the threads, you worry if you’ll ever be able to pick them up again. I......

Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling is testifying in a Manhattan federal courtroom this morning against a small publisher trying to release an encyclopedia based on her work. In the past, Rowling has been supportive of the fan-based websites that explore her novels, but when RDR Books announced last fall that it would be publishing a book version of the The Harry Potter Lexicon website, Rowling filed a lawsuit claiming copyright infringement. Lawyers for RDR Books......